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British actress Andrea Riseborough says she has had two fights for equal pay in the last two weeks alone.

The star – who is best known for her work in Oscar-winning film Birdman, as Wallis Simpson in W.E and as Margaret Thatcher in Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk To Finchley – said the struggle for pay parity is a daily fight.

Arriving at the premiere of her new film Battle Of The Sexes at the BFI London Film Festival, she told the Press Association: “In the last 14 days I’ve had two battles, where I wasn’t going to get paid as much as the guy opposite me, who isn’t as well known and has a smaller part, and it happens all the time.

Andrea Riseborough attending the premiere of Battle of the Sexes (Ian West/PA)

“I always tell people it’s a vagina, not a lobotomy.

“Don’t say that at dinner parties to white heterosexual males!”

In the film, about the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, Riseborough plays King’s lover Marilyn Barnett.

She continued: “Every day sometimes feels like you have to go out there bolstered, you know when you go to the bowling alley and there are those bumpers down the lanes?

“I feel like being a woman sometimes is like you have to have those bumpers in your ovaries, ready to fend off being patronised, it’s so subliminal.

“It’s tough, you get up and do the same thing every day but I think this is an important movie because Billie is an important person, what she did for social change was really phenomenal and it’s kind of strange to think about it – but the comment that was made about Serena Williams playing a man in a match was so recent and this happened so long ago.”

Battle Of The Sexes is released in UK cinemas on November 24.

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